Their question was “Why is VMS so much faster than Unix?”

They of course used the new fangled words for “VMS” and “Unix,” but the idea was the same. The short answer is that it’s because they are different operating systems and that they focus on different consumers. The long answer is very long.

It goes a bit like this: One is not faster than the other. They do different things at different speeds. VMS has been known for doing the things that humans notice more quickly than the things that humans don’t notice. In recent years, NeXT has changed this a bit, and a bit of that change has dribbled into the more mainstream Unix front ends such as KDE and GNOME.

It is also true that more people have historically payed money for the VMS variants than for the Unix variants. This has created industries loyal to VMS based on the amount of dollars floating around. This is good and bad in much the same ways that Unix and VMS are good and bad. The VMS world ends up being the guinea pig for a lot of things intended to improve Customer Experience, as they call it.

Blah blah blah. It’s time to start work.